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Category: Climategate

Our very planet depends on them. Yet they remain nature’s most elusive scientific species, inhabiting some of the world’s most delicate and daunting academic environments. But thanks to new breakthroughs in high speed cameras and email files, metascientists are finally beginning to understand their mysterious behaviors and complex social interactions. Tonight on Iowahawk Geographic: step inside the Secret Life of the Climate Researchers.

Our very planet depends on them. Yet they remain nature’s most elusive scientific species, inhabiting some of the world’s most delicate and daunting academic environments. But thanks to new breakthroughs in high speed cameras and email files, metascientists are finally beginning to understand their mysterious behaviors and complex social interactions. Tonight on Iowahawk Geographic: step inside the Secret Life of the Climate Researchers.

The second batch of emails released exposing the behind-the-scenes machinations of climate scientists have had the desired effect, and a journalist for one of the UK’s major newspapers has begun serious efforts to dig into the released files for hard evidence of wrongdoing.

What does this file really tell us, if anything, about the identity of the hacker? I have annotated all the places in the file which I think are of potential interest – and explained why.

…

For example, there are the stylistic writing quirks. And what about the quotes at the beginning that help to underscore the “motivation” behind releasing the emails? Where do they come from? The motivation is obvious enough, but do these clues help to paint a profile – nationality, cultural heritage, competence with computers etc – of the perpetrator?

That’s at least three questions Hickman is investigating. Which is three more questions than he’s asked of climate scientists openly discussing deletion of emails, subverting the FOIA process and bullying peers into submission.

It’s hacktastic. Richard Nixon would have given his right left arm to have lived with what we call journalism today.

In the weeks leading up to a climate conference, Big Climate likes to flood the media with scare stories about all the bad things that will happen to Gaia if the world’s leaders fail to fund more climate science act on emissions.

Big Climate has been playing the same game for years, and every year is the last chance to save the planet from a harmless trace gas essential to life on Earth. Durban is this year’s last chance, in 2009 it was Copenhagen, 2008 was Poland, in 2007 Bali, and in 2006 Nairobi.

Next week, the COP17 conference begins in Durban. There were already low to no expectations of a deal. The fragile economies of most of the western world means fake problems like the weather will be put on the back burner, probably forever. But the release of 5,000 more emails in Climategate 2 has derailed even this weak meeting of climate minds.

So far, some embarrassing finds have been mined from the emails, but (as of time of writing) no blockbuster quote like the iconic ‘hide the decline’ has popped up. But Big Climate is mad as hell that the emails were released, and their fury is proof they didn’t learn a thing after the original Climategate debacle.

He said, the people behind the release were “agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat. Its right out of the tried-and-true playbook of climate change denial.”

In the UK, Big Science circles the wagons rather than even consider that there may be something rotten at the core of politicized climate science:

Dr Simon Lewis, Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds, said it was all about politics.

“This latest email leak, again on the eve of important international climate talks, is about politics. Yet the shadowy, undemocratic group trying to influence these international talks will fail. I sat through two weeks of talks in Copenhagen after the first email release and heard them mentioned only once. This new leak will have a similarly limited impact. Governments know that climate science reports signed off by over 190 countries, each with their own scientists, cannot be unduly influenced by a single scientist or a small group. These emails are irrelevant.”

Dr. Lewis may recall that Copenhagen was supposed to be the last chance for the world to reach an agreement on climate policy. COP15 failed dismally, in no small part because of the revelations of Climategate. That he only heard Climategate mentioned once at Copenhagen reveals more about the ivory tower inhabited by climate scientists than he realizes, it’s not something to brag about.

The uncomfortable truth for Lewis, Mann, Jones et al is that climate scientists behaved badly, were caught, and then exposed. If they’d been less petty and arrogant and complied with legal FOIA requests, or made data freely available, Climategate 1 & 2 would never have happened. But that would have required them to behave like scientists, not activists, and that seems to be asking far too much of the people running climate science.

“These leftover emails should be met with a collective yawn,” said Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) Scientific Integrity Program. “It’s time to condemn the real perpetrators in this story: the hackers who stole and released university property. The hackers and their allies are resorting to desperate measures to distract the public when our focus should be on how to respond to climate change.”

Right, move along nothing to see here. It’s not really all about money, even if the UCS admits dogs as members, as long as they pay the dues.

UCS Spokesdog Kenji Watts was unavailable for comment on the latest email revelations, which is probably just as well.

The emails haven’t been verified yet, and appear not be a new leak, but a second batch from the first round of Climategate. So whether this is Climategate 2.0 or 1.2 is unclear. This time the zip file came with a README:

/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State University, who is quoted in the batch of released emails described the release as “truly pathetic”.

When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”

A similar release in 2009 triggered the “ClimateGate” affair and accusations of fraud that inquiries later dismissed. Now, as then, the release comes shortly before the annual UN climate summit.

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Reviews of “ClimateGate” in the UK, of the IPCC, and of Michael Mann’s work by Penn State authorities, have all cleared scientists of fraud and malpractice, although recommendations were made on increasing openness.

The emails haven’t been verified yet, and appear not be a new leak, but a second batch from the first round of Climategate. So whether this is Climategate 2.0 or 1.2 is unclear. This time the zip file came with a README:

/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State University, who is quoted in the batch of released emails described the release as “truly pathetic”.

When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”

A similar release in 2009 triggered the “ClimateGate” affair and accusations of fraud that inquiries later dismissed. Now, as then, the release comes shortly before the annual UN climate summit.

…

Reviews of “ClimateGate” in the UK, of the IPCC, and of Michael Mann’s work by Penn State authorities, have all cleared scientists of fraud and malpractice, although recommendations were made on increasing openness.

Warmist outfit the Sea Level Research Group has decided that if observed facts don’t fit the narrative, they’ll make data up:

…instead of reporting the amount by which sea level is rising in the real world, the Sea Level Research Group has begun adding 0.3 millimeters per year of fictitious sea level rise to “compensate” for rising land mass.

The extra 0.3 millimeters of fictitious sea level rise will add up to 1.2 inches over the course of the 21st century. While this is not monumental in and of itself, it will allow alarmists to paint a dramatically different picture of sea level rise than is occurring in the real world. For example, the current pace of 8 inches of sea level rise for the present century is essentially no different than the 7 inches of sea level rise that occurred last century. However, with an artificially enhanced 9.2 inches of sea level rise, alarmists can claim sea level is rising 31 percent faster than it did last century.

No wonder climate scientists are taking to rap, they have nothing left.

warmist fantasy island

When you’re busted for making up data, there’s no hiding the decline in the integrity of pro-AGW science. NASA funds the Sea Level Research making-it-up-as-we-go Group. Perhaps they ought not to.

The latest Gallup poll shows the number of Americans who are concerned about global warming is stable at around 51%.

hide the decline?

If the people at Gallup were proper scientists, they would realize these unacceptable numbers require Mike’s Nature trick or similar finessing to reverse the inconvenient trend of ever-sinking support for global warming.

Polls like this are sure to send hippies into paroxysms about how evil deniers are corrupting the minds of Americans, but in reality they’re doing this to themselves with over the top rhetoric and eagerness to jump on any natural disaster and link it to slightly nicer weather caused by a trace gas essential to life on Earth.

As for the Grist piece, I tweeted this at the time, and think it still sounds about right:

The more they rave, the fewer people listen. Christopher Mims is a skeptic recruitment machine, long may he continue.